The Convert

Part mystery, biography, memoir, history, narrative
nonfiction escapade, Deborah Baker’s The Convert doesn’t
fit in any one category. Like its subject, Margaret
Marcus/Maryam Jameelah, the book is a misfit. And like creative
nonfiction should, it poses questions, and in wrestling with
those questions, it jigs loose more questions, bigger questions,
questions that tie you in knots, give you an unscratchable itch,
or maybe incite you to hurl something not unlike a hardback
volume across the room. In any case, it is a book you want to
discuss.

First, you probably want to discuss Margaret “Peggy” Marcus,
an American Jew born in Westchester County, New York. After
coming of age during the postwar period, she converted to Islam,
dubbed herself Maryam Jameelah, rejected America to spend the
rest of her life in Pakistan, and became a well-known figure in
the Islamic world. According to author Deborah Baker, Jameelah’s
books “continue to influence the way the Islamic world thinks of
the West—America in particular.” Her writings have been
described as “broadly responsible for cementing the global
cultural divide between Islam and the West.”

With your next discursive breath, you’re liable to want to
cover Jameelah’s transformation from Peggy Marcus. In the
lead-up to Jameelah’s relocation to Pakistan, land of her
dreams, you’ll chat about Marcus’s commitments to New York
psychiatric hospitals:

Margaret Marcus was not the sole misfit in the 1950s asylum.
Artists, poets, homosexuals, communists, and unhappy housewives
joined her.

Like them, Margaret found it impossible to comply with those
little understandings, those slippery accommodations that made
the world she was born into run smoothly.

Thus, outcast from the world into which she was born, Marcus
sought another. In Islam, she found a world ruled by rigorous
discipline, strict obedience of moral law, and struggle in
service of the faith—the “one true path” from which one strayed
not by the width of a single burqa thread. And through Islam,
Marcus found Abul Ala Mawdudi, your next likely topic of
discussion.

Celebrated throughout the Islamic world for his writings on
Islam as well as his advocacy of an Islamic political order,
Mawdudi invited the outcast American woman to live in Pakistan
as his adopted daughter. This came about through correspondence
initiated by Marcus before she officially converted but after
she had begun publishing essays in English-language Muslim
periodicals. Once she arrived in Lahore, Mawdudi discovered that
her brand of crazy was more than he and his family could handle.
He foisted her onto loyal followers before committing her to a
Pakistani madhouse. One of his loyal followers, however, smelled
money in her madness and took her as a second wife, thus
springing her from the asylum, fathering her children, and
continuing to support her as she published book after book
rejecting the West’s evil ways.

Before you go much further, you’ll want to pause—as the
author does throughout—and ask some questions. How and why did
Islam become the remedy? When examining Margaret/Maryam’s life
choices, do you look only at cultural biases (Islam vs. the
West), or do social biases (lunacy vs. sanity) enter the frame
as well? What was really going on between Mawdudi and
Margaret/Maryam? It purports to be Margaret/Maryam’s story, but
isn’t it just as much Baker’s? Ultimately, the lion of the
desert’s share of your questions could address the author
herself, specifically the author’s motives and methods. For this
you might blast straight to page 225, “A Note on Methodology.”
More often than not, if creative nonfiction authors have a
disclosure, they often fess up in the end material, and Deborah
Baker has just such a disclosure. Butlet’s say you’re in
a linear mood, and you don’t like to read a book’s end material
until warranted; that is, until the end.

Baker’s story begins in the New York Public Library archives,
where she discovers the “Maryam Jameelah Papers,” containing
letters Margaret Marcus sent to her parents, as well as her
published articles. As the Pulitzer-nominated biographer tugs at
the thread of how a woman like Margaret Marcus became Maryam
Jameelah, eventually following that thread to Pakistan, she
finds that small questions only lead to larger ones. The author
writes:

Anonymity is my vocation. I inhabit the lives of my subjects
until I think like them. Behind the doors of my study, I wear
them like a suit of out-of-date clothes, telling their stories,
interpreting their dreams, mimicking their voices as I type. I
find myself most susceptible to those tuned to an impossible
pitch, poets and wild-eyed visionaries who live their lives
close to the bone. Haunting archives, reading letters composed
in agony and journals thick with unspeakable thoughts, I sound
the innermost chambers of unquiet souls; unearth dramas no one
would ever think to make up.

That is, until Baker attempts to sound the innermost chambers
of Maryam Jameelah, who, it turns out, punctuated much of her
own drama with made-up scenes, made-up props, and made-up lines.

I felt like a carpenter who, while he is dutifully milling
old boards, sees his saw bite on a hidden nail, sending
splinters flying in all directions. Only then did it occur to me
that I had made the same mistake [Mawdudi] had made. From a
series of letters I had conjured an entire being. I imagined I
knew Maryam Jameelah.

A Brooklyn-based writer, Baker continues to follow the
Marcus/Jameelah thread for personal reasons stemming from the
9/11 attacks. In the end, as she discloses in “A Note on
Methodology,” she finds she must condense and rewrite Jameelah’s
letters in order to make sense of Jameelah’s life, and to
investigate certain questions about the world, as well as her
own mindset. “Some readers,” Baker says, “might find this simply
unorthodox, others may well feel misled.” You, on the other
hand, might see this as one more way the author inhabits
Jameelah’s life, mimicking her voice as she types. Either way,
The Convert will give you lots to talk about.